Materiality, Brutality and Risk: Decolonial Readings of the Twin Climate and Energy Crisis

Complex power clusters drive mainstream debates on climate change and the energy transition with enormous cognitive, symbolic, institutional and financial capacity. Sociology has often framed materiality in opposition to the social. However, the actual twin climate and energy crises present robust evidence of a whole set of socio-environmental transformations whose materiality is turning upside-down our old readings of the social. Like in the case of IPCC-driven debates on climate change, government and corporative capacity to produce significant change is being eventually challenged. A renewed decolonial-turn literature is eventually emerging in environmental and risk sociology. Indeed, the brutality of the geopolitics of land-grabbing and the role of financial capitalism in subjugating entire ecosystems and people reflect the new environmental resource-driven colonialism. The Yanomami in Brazil, Chinese widespread land-grabbing practices spanning from Bhutan to Chile, and the doubling of the United States' ownership of foreign agricultural land from 2009 to 2019 [according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)] all reflect an unfolding transformation. The notions of materiality, environmental risk and coloniality are being recombined. The session aspires to gather papers that will offer an overview of the twin climate and energy crises experienced by those living them from the margins of countries from the Global South, global urban peripheries and marginal rural areas and regions.